Tom Wolfe on Hunter Thompson in WSJ

Those three terms, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Wall Street Journal, do not seem easily to roll out together but nevertheless see today's OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts:

"Hunter's life, like his work, was one long barbaric yawp, to use Whitman's term, of the drug-fueled freedom from and mockery of all conventional proprieties that began in the 1960s. In that enterprise Hunter was something entirely new, something unique in our literary history. When I included an excerpt from 'The Hell's Angels' in a 1973 anthology called 'The New Journalism,' he said he wasn't part of anybody's group. He wrote 'gonzo.' He was suigeneris. And that he was.
Yet he was also part of a century-old tradition in American letters, the tradition of Mark Twain, Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby, comic writers who mined the human comedy of a new chapter in the history of the West, namely, the American story, and wrote in a form that was part journalism and part personal memoir admixed with powers of wild invention, and wilder rhetoric inspired by the bizarre exuberance of a young civilization. No one categorization covers this new form unless it is Hunter Thompson's own word, gonzo. If so, in the 19th century Mark Twain was king of all the gonzo-writers. In the 20th century it was Hunter Thompson, whom I would nominate as the century's greatest comic writer in the English language. "

The entire article is an honest tribute to Thompson's oddities and talents.

BTW, I heartily recommend (except for parents with kids in college) Wolfe's latest I Am Charlotte Simmons.